Picturing Your Social Business In 2020

What will a "social business" look like seven years from now? For starters, the CIO will have a transformed role.

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Futurists predict that by the year 2020, clothing will feature memory devices to capture our daily experiences and smartphones will beam images directly to our retinas. Doctors will test drugs that end the obesity epidemic and asteroid mining will be a new industry. But what will a "social business" look like seven years from now?

For one thing, most of today's businesses won't be around in 2020 -- 71% of them will fail within 10 years, according to Statistic Brain. To survive, all businesses will need to be highly agile and collaborative; in other words, they will all need to be social.

Today, social companies are aggressively outsourcing every function that's not strategic or mission critical. Forrester Research predicts that most central IT departments will disappear by 2020 as IT functions move into other business departments, while Dick Csaplar of Aberdeen predicts the end of data centers. (VMware CEO Paul Gelsinger begs to differ, arguing that "people who say put everything into the cloud have never met a highly regulated customer.") Software-as-a-service has already begun eliminating the traditional role of IT: For example, professionals now turn directly to the cloud for applications such as email, CRM, backup and even system management.

CIOs, meantime, will survive this revolution but take on vastly different roles. "The CIO will play the role of orchestrator and integrator of external services and service providers instead of internally building and owning such applications directly, while at the same time directing more front-end, customer-facing work," says Forrester Research Director Christopher Mines. In general, effective CIOs will take responsibility for turning innovation into business value.

CIOs won't be the only ones adjusting to new responsibilities. By the year 2020, the entire notion of a company employee will change. Google CEO Eric Schmidt thinks that within five years, computers might be able to pass the Turing test, indicating that a machine's intelligence is indistinguishable from a human's. Computers, some predict, will be powerful enough to simulate the human brain. Optimistically, these new levels of computing power will augment the insight and creativity of employees rather than replace them.

Because successful businesses will depend more than ever on the quality of their employees, the HR department will be pivotal. Recruiters are already looking at potential employees' social media presence and Google search results rather than just traditional resumes. By 2020, employees will rely on continually available, real-time performance feedback using gamification concepts such as badge incentives rather than just the dreaded annual performance review. Professional development will make increasing use of interactive training and massive open online courses.

@Vala, thanks for an awesome, pithy call to action! As a corporate (social business) strategy consultant, I agree with your thesis here, that businesses need to get social and digital to survive, and they need to be aggressive if they want to thrive. For all readers who may feel afraid of machines displacing humans in many current jobs, I'll offer these insights.

Most people don't realize it, but a lot of what we still regard as "management" will be unnecessary. Because the global economy is dominated by large, complex organizations, a lot of management and coordination have been required to keep the balls in the air. I agree with Vala that orgs and networks will increasingly self-manage. Bad news for people who like relatively well paid administrivia jobs (and they do have their charm).

The good news is, the puck is going to a far more fun, creative place. The catch is, to thrive in the "Creative Class" (google Richard Florida), people need to awaken the right sides of their brains, which have too often atrophied. My new book, The Social Channel, posits that, as long as humans are the customers (instead of machines), people have nothing to worry about because people will always value the incremental value that only other people can give. Machines will get more humanlike, but people will discount their value *because* they are machines. Customer "experience" will be the bedrock of the Knowledge Economy, not what we used to think of as products.

@Vala, how would you advise people to prepare? My crystal ball says, get as close to the human elements of experience and differentiation as possible. Machines will always be inferior there.

Combine the benefits of internal collaboration as well as extended collaboration (collective intelligence) available to social businesses with the sorts of machine-to-machine communication referenced by Chris Murphy above, and you have an unstoppable competitive advantage over non-social businesses.

The changes and new technologies coming between now and 2020 only play into the strengths of the social business. Even with these technologies, a non-social business is at a crippling disadvantage in understanding and delivering the customer experience demanded by Gen-C.

Of all these trends, the most powerful to me is this passive collection of data. Set aside the privacy concerns a minute and think what that means for companies and for consumer expectations for product performance. How can you not know that my car stopped working, it died three hours ago?

ITís tried for years to simplify data analytics and business intelligence efforts. Have visual analysis tools and Hadoop and NoSQL databases helped? Respondents to our 2014 InformationWeek Analytics, Business Intelligence, and Information Management Survey have a mixed outlook.